


to those in their towers

by andstarswillscream



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Character Study, Medical Malpractice, Mutiny, Other, Past Torture, The Various Failures of Autobot High Command, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 13:18:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11945049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andstarswillscream/pseuds/andstarswillscream
Summary: He’d spent his whole life fighting to kill him. Atomizer reminded him that he’d only been alive for a few hundred years at most. Funny how the years fell away when you focused on that one time you screwed up.





	to those in their towers

He’d spent his whole life fighting to kill him. Atomizer reminded him that he’d only been alive for a few hundred years at most. Funny how the years fell away when you focused on that one time you screwed up.

But this wasn’t just focus, it was blinding. Consuming. Getaway had looked Megatron, death itself, in the face, and ran. The one job he had, the sole thing he was created for, and it slipped through his fingers. He’d had a gun in his hand. The enemy was bare, unprotected. _Right there._ And he’d run, a scared sparkling, in the heat of something bigger than he’d ever known, created for a faction he had no agency in choosing.

The first action he took upon waking up, he never forgot. Even as faces and years melted by, blurry and exhausting. Even as the scars of the war carved his frame, made him into who he was, he never forgot his first mistake.

Prowl took him in. Perhaps it was because of his potential. Perhaps it was pity. But there was a kindness in his first mission, in how he’d been paired with Skids, the brilliant bastard he was. And there was a pride in Prowl’s eyes as he told them good work. Getaway lived for it, how Prowl saw an asset in him, a worth he himself had never learned to formulate.

He stayed under Prowl, darting between the shadows behind Ultra Magnus and Tyrest himself. He learned from Prowl, how to look beyond relationships and egoes, beyond friends, coworkers. Everyone was either an asset, or something to destroy. He learned, fairly quickly, that was how High Command saw him. To have thrown him when he’d barely defrosted, before he could even see the fast approaching ground below… No, he’d been created to kill, and kill, and then die, once his usefulness ran out. Medics would overlook mechs like him, and focus on others, who stood a better chance.

He would have been left to bleed away, the same as the others he’d come online with. They hadn’t stationed enough medics on Corcapsia, not to handle all the mechs they’d brought online for the fight.

He used Prowl’s database raking over the numbers, the casualties. The specifics, the weapons in use. Their registries. The records of ammunition, what had been loaded. What had been fired. What hit a target. What killed.

His gun wouldn’t fire, not because he ran, but because it wasn’t loaded.

Made-to-Order soldiers, they’d been called. Made to die, to prove a point. A laugh in the face of Megatron, who believed everyone had value outside of their means of creation.

Getaway felt sick. A lifetime of obsessing over his failure, only to find that it wasn’t his at all.

The sick feeling only intensified as he was caught by Tyrest. Hoping Skids escaped safely. Hoping aimlessly for Prowl to.. Who was he kidding.

Tortured, endlessly, until he couldn’t move without heaving. Joints, seams, his spark aching. 

Told the grand scheme, told he didn’t deserve to survive, by the simple fact that he was sick, unnatural. A knock-off.

Things changed. He escaped, with a band of Autobots who claimed to be searching for the Gods that had abandoned their people long ago. Getaway tagged along, only because of Skids, who seemed to be suffering from the effects of… a particularly powerful nudge gun. Getaway would have blamed himself, if there’d been anything he could have done about it.

But… what was the point of an escapologist who couldn’t escape?

He found out relatively quickly, that he hated life on the Lost Light. Rodimus and all his ego, the Great and True Prime who shrunk back when Megatron entered a room, who had a ship built in the shape of his head, who let Optimus Prime dictate that everyone should suddenly be okay with Megatron’s change of spark. As if a spark that heavy and sick with the weight of gleefully crushed millions could ever change.

And Megatron, wearing an Autobot badge. What a joke.

So he formulated a plan. Asking the crew how they felt about Megatron. Hitting them with a good _nudge_ when he’d gotten his answer. Slinking in the background, gathering up his own crew. Setting his plan in motion. Adapting, being amicable.

Both the flower, and the serpent beneath, waiting for the right hand to stray.

Tailgate, oh sweet Tailgate. It had been too easy. It had been a real shame. (Not too much of a shame. He’d still gone through with it.) Nearly rid of Megatron. Exposed by Whirl, barely lucid.

No matter. He still had his crew. He still had his plan. And he would have that damn map.

And he did. Sending those he couldn’t trust into the depths of space, to be hunted down. It was his turn now, to give the orders.

This time? He would load their guns.


End file.
